The Republican. [volume] (Oakland, Md.) 1877-current, 1887-03-19
CAPE COD WOMEN.
Beautiful Creatures at Sixteen and Old
and Haggard at Thirty.


and Haggard at Thirty.
'1f there was ever blighted race of
women,' said a gentleman of this city,
recently returned from visit to Cape
Cod, ''it exists in the peninsular viii
lagos of Massachusetts, which depend
on the fisheries for the support of their
inhabitants. Nowhere else in all New
England will one ever see so high an
average of female beauty, especially in
symmetry of form and freshness of
complexion; but it will not take one
long to discover that this girlish beauty
and freshness, while unusual and unex-
pected, is also in its duration very brief.
The change produced in these girls by
the lapse of few years is painful to
cl,cerve. No matronly graces are to
be seen among them after their girl
hood days are past. That charm
ing middle stage of maturing woman
hood, between the freshness and
buoyancy of the girl of twenty and the
woman of thirty-five or forty, is en-
tirely absent. The heightened color of
the cheek is gone. The eyes are
sunken, and wear constant look of
sadness and anxiety. Gray hair in
heads over which score and a half of
years have scarcely passed, and deep
lines in faces which should show no
trace of age for years to come, are
rather the rule than the exception.
These women, besides suffering from
all the inevitable sorrows which fall to
wOman's lot. no matter in what station
she may be placed, have an added in
tense and perpetual sorrow all their
own. Theirs is life of continual sus-
pense and anxiety, which is almost GER
tain in time to be embttered by an over
whelming grief.
The most obtuse observer need not
ask the cause of this lack of complete
matronly beauty among these women,
whose budding days opened with the
greatest promise of a superb physical
womanhood. The cause suggests itse.f
at once to one who sees the congrega-
tions of women on the beaches and in
the quiet streets of the villages. He will
notice occasionally a feeble old man
among them, generally supported on the
arm of some female companion, who,
most likely, carries on her other arm a
chubby-faced child of lusty lungs. But
in these groups, or anywhere around the
village, the observer will look in vain
for the presence of males between the
lettering years of these relics of the
past. and the prattling days of baby
hood. 1t is the fishing season, and
there are no men or boys on shore.
Their smacks are tossing on the treacher-
Gus waters of the fishing banks, and
their return, if they return at all, is as
uncertain as the weather, which forms
the one great subject of conjecture and
apprehension among the villagers.
Husbands, sons, fathers, brothers and
sweethearts are somewhere out on the
bosom of the sea, probably homeward
bound, perhaps steering for still more
distant waters, perhaps struggling for
life among the waves. Fair weather
keeps hope warm in many an anxious
woman's heart; the bowling northeaster
fills it with doubt and despair. Con-
stantly watching by day, waking in the
night to listen to sounds from the sea,
whether they may be the roaring of
the dreaded tempest or merely the moan
of the surf on the beach, is it any wonder
that the torture of mind and heart and
the strain of nerve and vital force that
must follow this perpetual suspense and
longing destroy the fountains of youth
and beauty in these patient, suffering
women, and place upon them the marks
of age while they are yet young?
yet the girls grow up with but one
thought of what their future lot will be,
with but one object in view upon which
their visions of happiness are based.
60 among any group of these bright
girls, in any of the villages of the class
am speaking of, and you will find that
line out of ten of them look forward to
union with some one who will spend
his life fishing in the summer and coast
ing in the winter. /he idea that there
might be any other future than the one
which is to come to them as tishermen's
wives, or that the life of fisherman s
wife is any thing different from the
atural sequence of married life, never
GEMS to occur. ~. Y. Mail and En-
press.
IIeoEul A;n4e L., R..;lLia.